Musical Hems

My mother hemmed DD#2’s pants yesterday (by hand, because she’s good that way) and I hemmed my mother’s pants on the new coverstitch machine.

I was curious to see how it worked out of the box, and I was not disappointed. I set the machine up, threaded it, changed to the clear foot from my other machine—the accessory that should come standard but doesn’t—and made a few test hems on a scrap piece of stretch velvet. The velvet was the closest I could come to the stretch velour of my mother’s pants. The only change I had to make was to loosen the presser foot pressure, which came from the factory set way too high. That is a common issue with those machines, for some odd reason.

[The machine was threaded but had not been stitched off. Stitching off a machine would be a great indication that the presser foot pressure is set too high, if Janome would bother to do that. I could tell the pressure was too high because the presser foot distorted the fabric as it was sewing. It would have distorted plain quilting cotton, too, so it wasn’t because I was coverstitching stretch velvet.]

Despite that, the machine coverstitched beautifully after I adjusted it:

No skipped stitches on the inside, even over the bulky side seams!

Normally, I stitch so that the threads cover the raw edge of the fabric. My mother had already tried to hem these pants on her sewing machine, so I coverstitched below that hem, then took her hem out and trimmed the excess fabric. Trimming doesn’t look quite as neat, but it works.

I’m delighted. I think this machine and I are going to have many happy hours together. I’ll keep the old machine to take when I teach classes. I have a basic serger class coming up January 4th and the T-shirt class starts January 19th.

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My sister and her boyfriend fly back to North Carolina today and my mother leaves tomorrow morning. DD#2 is here until Thursday. We had a nice Christmas. DD#1 sent a box of Christmas presents down from Alaska. I wish we had thought to take some pictures when my mother opened her “Men of Alaska” calendar, because her reaction was priceless. My sister bought me the Little House on the Prairie cookbook and a scratch-and-sniff book about whiskeys. (So useful!) We made lots of food and ate way too much of it. We watched the Browns lose to the Packers.

[No, Baker should not have thrown those interceptions, but it would be nice if the officiating wasn’t so one-sided. Face mask? Holding? Hello?}

I’ll start putting the house back together after church today. My schedule is completely discombobulated and have to think about what day it is. This always happens. And I’m already itching for a road trip. The January calendar is, thus far, mostly empty. That bodes well for productivity in the sewing room.